Abstract
The world demands more and more energy due to the continuous population increase. In parallel, high organic and nutrient contents of wastewater streams are generated from anthropogenic activities like urbanization, industrialization, and agricultural practices. The continuous discharge of these wastewater streams into water bodies has been considered responsible for oxygen depletion and eutrophication in the environment. Integrating microalgae cultivation into wastewater treatment can be a promising solution to produce renewable energy while removing pollutants. In contrast to several review articles published about microalgae cultivation on different wastewater streams, the current review is focusing mainly on microalgae-based wastewater treatment on agricultural waste streams. Hence, first of all, the main characteristics of different agricultural streams will be described, then microalgal consortia cultivation, as well as monoculture strains, will be evaluated. Moreover, the photobioreactor systems for agricultural wastewater treatment will also be summarized. Finally, harvesting methods for microalgae recovery will be presented.
Highlights
The growing world demands for energy and the increase in waste generation have the same origin: the growth of the world population
The hydraulic retention time (HRT) and solids retention time (SRT) are two factors that should be taken into account as well as the type of microalgae; the most common microalgae genera used in this kind of bioreactor are Chlorella and Scenedesmus, and even more important the application of microalgae-bacteria consortia cultivation (Luo et al, 2017; Ting et al, 2017; Li et al, 2019)
Thereby, the microalgae-based wastewater treatment process is established as an eco-friendly solution where natural processes from microalgae are used to achieve the removal of minerals or heavy metals; biomass production could be used as a potentially renewable resource for energy
Summary
The growing world demands for energy and the increase in waste generation have the same origin: the growth of the world population. Due to the high organic and nutrient content of wastewater streams from anthropogenic activities like urbanization, industrialization, and agricultural practices and their continuous discharge into water bodies (Cheah et al, 2016; Gupta et al, 2019; Al-Jabri et al, 2021), they have been considered to be responsible for oxygen depletion (Cheah et al, 2016) and eutrophication (Cheah et al, 2016; Umamaheswari, J Shanthakumar, 2016; Li et al, 2019) This characteristic made these streams the ideal source media for microalgae growth (Al Darmaki et al, 2012).
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